Last month we were blessed by being joined with two great talents as full-time employees. In just a couple of years, the size of our squad has been rapidly increasing with both members showing full commitment in our operations and key industrial experts among various disciplines joining our advisory board. At the time I embarked upon this business back in November 2015, I did not expect it to involve this many people. With more than a decade of working as chief analyst in large organizations — and there is no doubt that multinational pharma companies are ones of the biggest among all industry sectors — I solidified my belief that the most effective way to convey my competence to my clients was to work with a very small team, if not going solo. I was occupied by the myth that a large team may dilute the quality of the service that a person like me can uniquely offer to the world. Honestly, I was a bit fed up with the frictions and politics interwoven in projects involving a large number of people.

However, as demand to our services kept on growing, it increasingly became clear that I have come near capacity. In order not to disappoint our clients by asking them to call us again later, I made a strategic decision to increase the size of the team. This motivation was primarily derived by a research done by group from Microsoft and Facebook, which found that in an experimental environment, the gains to collaboration dominated the losses to social loafing, and the largest teams outperformed an equivalent number of independent workers[1]. The implication is clear; if I keep on working as an individual agent, at some point I may fall victim to a competitor with a group of specialists, even if I maintain my advantage as the best expert in the field. Since then, I started talking with recruiters and HR agents, and we continue to discuss about the type of people who can best fit to our organization and help expand our business even further.

As CEO of e-Projection, I believe that we are following the right path to grow the business. Despite, or even because of covid-19, the need to innovate in a more open setting and to look for expertise/resources externally has become even more prominent. This is particularly the case in a corporate environment where in the past many executives believed that those specialties would have to be sourced within. We will keep up with our efforts to be able to supply our services stably to our client base, and to try to figure out the right size of our organization for that purpose.

[1] Mao et al 2016; https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27082239/